Skinning and JavaScript Support

357062

I'm not sure if OHJ is this advanced yet, but one of the main alternate Help technologies I have been strongly investigating is eHelp's WebHelp. We are trying to deliver cross-platform Help (UNIX and Windows) and WebHelp claims this support this option. The problem is that eHelp's implementation of java script is not W3C compliant (home brewed?), which of course IE handles just fine, but Netscape simply chokes.

So, we are sticking with OHJ, which displays fine on UNIX and Windows. Is it possible to skin the OHJ interface, similar to the way WebHelp uses java script to apply skins?

Also, are there plans for DHTML tools in OHJ? I'm think of when you apply DHTML effects in RoboHelp and then display your topics in OHJ.

Thanks.

jrstephe-Oracle

The DHTML effects that RoboHelp can generate into topics makes
use of Javascript libraries that exploit some Internet Explorer
only features (for at least some of the effects). OHJ doesn't
support Javascript (Oracle hasn't licensed the Javascript module
for the embedded ICE Browser yet), so their DHTML effects aren't
supported in our system. Even if we did support Javascript,
many of the IE only effects wouldn't work in our browser.

Note that whatever Javascript you want (including RoboHelp's)
should work in Oracle Help for the Web, which just uses the
end user's browser (IE/Netscape) to display the help topic HTML
pages.

The user interface of Oracle Help for Java is a Java Swing
toolkit interface. The Java Swing toolkit has support
for pluggable look and feels (actually one of our demos
shows Oracle, Metal, and Windows look and feels). We
don't plan on making the OHJ user interface skinnable
(i.e. providing bitmaps for buttons, etc), but it is
possible that there is skinnable Swing look and feel
out there that you could use with OHJ.

As a side note, we do plan to make the Oracle Help for the
Web user interface more customizeable in future releases.
One method we are considering, is making the user interface
skinnable.